The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise quality as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Communication devices and systems, in order to communicate information, utilize communication protocols and standards that specify the manner in which information is to be communicated. For example, some protocols that are used for wireless communication are described in detail in the IEEE 802.11 Standards, including for example, the IEEE 802.11a (1999) Standard and its updates and amendments, the IEEE 802.11g (2003) Standard, as well as the IEEE 802.11e, the IEEE 802.11i, the IEEE 802.11n and the IEEE 802.11w Standards, all of which are collectively incorporated herein fully by reference.
One commonality among IEEE 802.11 Standards and other standards that describe communication protocols is that these standards specify formats for various information units (e.g., packets, frames, data units, datagrams, and so on) that may be used for packaging and communicating information between communication devices and systems. Generally, these information units include the actual information, or a portion thereof, that is intended to be communicated between communication devices and systems (often referred to as “payload information”) and/or supplemental information (often referred to as “overhead information” or “header information”) that is used for controlling the communication of the payload information. Some examples of overhead information include information used to provide flow control, congestion control, error control, security, and so on.
Generally, with the increase in the amount of overhead information, additional mechanisms are provided for controlling the communication of the payload information. As a result, an increase in overhead information may result in an improved accuracy of the communication. However, an increase in the amount of overhead information may also result in less payload information transmitted in a given time, possibly yielding lower throughput rates. Moreover, in order to process the additional overhead information, more sophisticated and/or expensive processing components may be required. Therefore, it is generally desired to balance these and other factors affected by the amount of overhead information by optimizing the amount of overhead information to achieve both suitable integrity of the communicated information and the efficiency of the communication.